Building a New PC – Components Picked

After nearly a year of research and deliberation, I have finally taken the big step and ordered the components for my new gaming PC. There have been a few changes in the last few months – particularly the case.

I chose the RAM and hard-drives on the basis of good quality products coming up on offer. I managed to save about £40 this way. The majority of the rest of the components aren’t subject to such big price fluctuations.

I backed off from my previous choice of case due to it’s size, instead opting for some discreet Scandinavian design in the form of the Fractal Node 304. It unfortunately doesn’t have space for a DVD drive, so I’ve picked up a cheap external drive to go with it. Sadly, the internet speed in my area of London isn’t good enough to let me rely solely on software downloads.

Some of the Haswell processors have dropped in price recently, which did make an upgrade to the slightly more powerful i5-4670K, which can be overclocked, but as I have no real interest in overclocking, I stuck with the more than adequate i5-4570.

I’m inclined towards nVidia graphics cards over AMD’s products anyway, so when they GTX 760 came out at the right price point I was half sold on it already. The MSI version of the card is reputed to run both coolly and quietly. I may yet regret going with nVidia over AMD if the use of AMD components in the XBox One and PS4 leads to major games performing better on AMD systems.

Finally, after a long debate with myself, I decided on Windows 8 as an operating system. I really like Windows 7, which I previously had on my Mac and which I use at work. It’s very slick, very simple and looks fantastic. I decided that I didn’t just want to stick with what I know in terms of Windows. I’m sure I can deal with the loss of the Start menu. Anyway, there is always SteamOS if I really don’t like it.

Interestingly, the finished computer will be very similar to some of Valve’s prototype Steam Machine PCs. The main differences are the amounts of storage and RAM.